Sunday, October 12, 2008

A Brand New JHillDesign.com

There is nothing quite like designing and programming your own e-commerce website. There are some great things (like designing it however you want) and some not so great things (like hours and hours of code). This how I spent the last couple months of my summer. I was feeling like my old site, which was up for about 3 years, was a bit tired and "immature" and I wanted to redo it. When my programmer fell through... I decided to give it a go myself and even learned some CSS (which I, of course, love now).For the shopping aspect I used paypal's shopping cart buttons. They are a great way to start an e-commerce site for someone with a few skus. The one limitation I don't like with them is that you can't offer coupon codes, but I couldn't have it all so they worked fine.Some things that I thought would be important to the new site were: being able to suggest products in a "you may also like" area, showing both the print drawing and close up photography, and easy to update navigation and (the most fun thing) being able to shop by place. Putting all the patterns into their country's form has me thinking of all sorts of other ideas.The site is live now and I'm very happy with it. Hopefully it will be another 3 years til I have to do it again! To check it out visit www.jhilldesign.com